Alan Colmes, Sean Hannity’s Liberal Partner on Fox News, Dies at 66

Alan Colmes, who for 12 years was a mild-mannered and moderately liberal sparring partner to the conservative firebrand Sean Hannity in Fox News Channel’s most conspicuous effort to fulfill its “fair and balanced” credo, died on Thursday in Manhattan. He was 66.

His wife, Jocelyn Elise Crowley, a professor of public policy at Rutgers University, said the cause was lymphoma.

Mr. Colmes, a Brooklyn-born grandson of Jewish immigrants from Ukraine, worked in radio and as a stand-up comic before Fox News recruited him.

Mr. Hannity, an Atlanta talk-radio host, had already been selected by Roger Ailes, founder and former chairman of Fox News, to represent the right — so far in advance that some insiders referred to the show as “Hannity & Liberal to Be Determined.”

After auditioning prospective co-hosts, Mr. Hannity was said to prefer the affable and witty Mr. Colmes. (“He was hired first and suggested me as a co-host,” Mr. Colmes later recalled. “I hope this answers, once and for all, why his name comes first in the title of our show.”)

“Hannity & Colmes” was born in October 1996 and remained on the air nightly until January 2009.

The two men were billed as co-hosts, and Mr. Ailes insisted that producers deploy a stopwatch to make sure they received equal time. But many liberal critics considered the pairing lopsided. Some characterized Mr. Colmes as a punching bag and even a sacrificial lamb who was neutralized by the considerably more combative Mr. Hannity.

Al Franken, the comedian who went on to become a United States senator, described Mr. Colmes in his book “Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right” (2003) as “a moderate milquetoast.” The media watchdog organization Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting harrumphed, “If the Harlem Globetrotters have the Washington Generals as their nightly fall guys, Sean Hannity has Alan Colmes.”

Mr. Colmes said he preferred to be in the minority among Fox’s stable of mostly conservative commentators rather than just another voice preaching to the liberal choir, though he sometimes described himself as a moderate, at least in demeanor.

“People say to me, ‘Why don’t you fight fire with fire?’” he told The Associated Press in 2003. “You fight fire with water, not fire.”

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Alan Colmes conducting an interview in 2004 after a presidential debate at Washington University in St. Louis.

CreditChris Hondros/Getty Images

In his 2012 book, “Thank the Liberals for Saving America,” Mr. Colmes argued that “almost every American holds many liberal views,” and that “conservatives have many more of them” than they admit.

“Sorry if that makes certain heads explode, but this ain’t Iran,” he wrote. “We live in one of the freest nations on earth, and that, in and of itself, makes you a liberal.”

Alan Samuel Colmes was born on Sept. 24, 1950, the son of Louis Colmes, an auctioneer, and the former Fay Wax. His parents owned several jewelry stores.

He grew up listening to the late-night radio hosts Long John Nebel and Barry Gray, graduated from Lynbrook High School on Long Island, attended Ithaca College and graduated from Hofstra University.

He landed a drive-time slot on WABC radio in 1984 — he was billed as W. Alan B. Colmes, to match the station’s call letters — and switched three years later to WNBC. He was also heard on WMCA in New York and WZLX in Boston before being hired by Fox.

After “Hannity & Colmes,” Mr. Colmes — whose books also included “Red, White & Liberal: How Left Is Right and Right Is Wrong” (2003) — appeared on Fox as a guest commentator; was the host of “The Alan Colmes Show,” syndicated by Fox News; ran the Liberaland blog; and contributed to AOL News. Starting in 2015, he supplied the voice of the Liberal Panel, a robot character that was part of a satirical segment on Fox News Channel’s “The Greg Gutfeld Show.”

Mr. Colmes was introduced to his wife through her sister Monica Crowley, another Fox News contributor. In addition to his wife, he is survived by a sister, Susan Colmes Braitman.

“When we started, neither of us had a lot of TV experience,” Mr. Hannity said in an interview on Thursday. “Every day we would go to work and say, ‘Somebody made a mistake,’ and say, ‘What are we doing here?’ We felt like the luckiest guys on earth. We built the show together, and we were both really proud of it.”

“The thing that most people never understood about us,” he added, “is, we had political differences, but were best friends. What we did on the air was real, but when the show ended, we put all that aside, and we could do that because of his fundamental decency.”

“Alan always held his own,” Mr. Hannity said. “And when he left, he said: ‘I did my job. I got Barack Obama elected.’”

Correction:

An earlier version of this obituary misstated the maiden name of Mr. Colmes’s mother. She was the former Fay Wax, not Fay Was.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page B16 of the New York edition with the headline: Alan Colmes, 66, Dies; Fox’s Liberal Foil to Hannity. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe